SanDisk Program Adds Demos to Memory Cards

At the Mobile World Congress trade show on Monday, SanDisk announced the company's new Service Delivery Cards, designed to let carriers preload flashy services onto phones and to greatly ease in-store demos.

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BARCELONAAt the Mobile World Congress trade show on Monday, SanDisk announced the company's new Service Delivery Cards, designed to let carriers preload flashy services onto phones and to greatly ease in-store demos.

Service Delivery Cards (SDCs) are specialized microSD cards with protected areas full of carrier-specific content. This lets carriers load DRM-protected music, games, or service demos onto the cards. SanDisk will work with individual carriers to create demonstration software to run on phones, showing off the phone's top features without front-line sales staff having to know how to work each phone.

"This piece of software allows you to get an experience of what it's like to browse and load ringtones, or what it's like to listen to music" before you buy the phone, said Elliot Broadwin, vice president of strategic business marketing at SanDisk.

The cards could also contain game demos or videos that are too large to be stored in a phone's main memory.

The cards, which come in sizes ranging from 1 to 16 Gbytes, will double as user data storage. Wireless carriers can choose how much storage to devote to their own content and how much to leave for the users.

This isn't SanDisk's first venture into putting preloaded content on memory cards, by far. The company's slotRadio music player comes with a 1,000 songs on a highly-DRM protected SD card. slotMusic, meanwhile, is an attempt to sell MP3s on memory cards. At CES, the company announced a new DRM method which makes some content on memory cards usable only to owners of a specific phone.

Broadwin said that SDCs will be deployed with "a major operator" in the second quarter of this year. That operator probably won't be Verizon Wireless, though, as the SDC software currently doesn't work with Verizon's BREW application platform. BREW compatibility is coming soon, Broadwin said.

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed...
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